With the development of the Internet and the Internet Protocol (IP, Internet Protocol) technology and rapid growth of the IP network bandwidth, the multimedia service represented by the video service also develops rapidly. Massive research in the industry and IP network traffic statistics show that in the IP network for bearing video services and file download services, long packets (1400 bits) account for about 80% of the total traffic currently (and is called “elephant flow”). It is generally predicted in the industry that in the next few years, the traffic of various video services will account for 80%-90% of the Internet traffic.
Video service traffic has some characteristics different from the traditional traffic of webpage browse: First, the session time is long, and is averagely several minutes to over one hour according to statistics in the industry; secondly, the packet is long and the traffic is large, and bandwidth is consumed massively; thirdly, the video service traffic will account for a dominant percentage in the total traffic of the IP network in the future. The structural change of the traffic in the IP network and the rapid growth of traffic bring new challenges to the technical development of the existing IP network.
A data forwarding method in the prior art is:
Many IP services have features of a session. That is, one session has many IP packets and continues for a certain period; the IP packets of the same session have the same basic information (such as source IP address, destination IP address, egress port number, and protocol type) of the IP packet header. Therefore, at the time of forwarding data, the IP forwarding device may apply the traditional IP forwarding processing to an initial packet, and then store the forwarding information into a stream table, where the forwarding information is obtained by searching a forwarding table during the processing of the initial packet. In this way, the subsequent IP packets of the session stream can be forwarded by directly searching the stream table. In such a forwarding process, except the initial packet, the subsequent IP packets of a stream may be processed through cheaper, simpler and faster stream forwarding. The stream forwarding part does not need to be implemented through a network processor (NP, Network Processor), and may be implemented through a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA, Field-Programmable Gate Array) or Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC, Application Specific Integrated Circuit), which is faster and more cost-effective.
However, in the data forwarding method in the prior art, the same forwarding mode is applied to the IP packets of short-session services such as ordinary network services and the IP packets of long-session services such as video services. Because a short-session service continues for a short period and occurs for many times, the stream table stores plenty of forwarding information of IP packets of short-session services, and the stream table is too large to maintain, and the efficiency of forwarding data is affected.